Struggle for National Government

Submission to Congress.

The convention adjourned on Sept. 17, 1787, having adopted the Constitution. Its last step was a resolution that the Constitution be sent to the Congress of the Confederation, with the recommendation that it be sub mitted to conventions elected by the people of each State for ratification or rejection ; that, if nine States should ratify it, Congress should appoint days for the popular election of elec tors, and that then the new Congress and President should, "without delay, proceed to execute this Constitution." Both Congress and the convention were careful not to open the dan gerous question, How was a Government which was not to be changed but by the legislatures of all the States to be entirely supplanted by a different system through the approval of con ventions in three-fourths of them? Action of the States.—Bef ore the end of the year Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey had ratified ; and Georgia, Con necticut and Massachusetts followed during the first two months of 1788. Thus far the only strong opposition had been in Massa chusetts, a "large State." In it the struggle began between the friends and the opponents of the Constitution, with its intro duction of a strong Federal power ; and it raged in the conven tions, legislatures, newspapers and pamphlets. In a classic series of papers, the Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, with the assis tance of James Madison and John Jay, explained the new Con stitution and defended it.

The seventh and eighth States—Maryland and South Caro lina—ratified in April and May 1788; and, while the conventions of Virginia and New York were still wrangling over the great question, the ninth State, New Hampshire, ratified, and the Con stitution passed out of theory into fact. The Anti-Federalists of the Virginia and New York conventions offered conditional ratifications of all sorts ; but the Federalists stubbornly refused to consider them, and at last, by very slender majorities, these two states ratified. North Carolina for a time refused to ratify the Constitution. In Rhode Island it was referred to the several towns instead of to a convention and was at first rejected by a majority, the Federalists, who advocated the calling of a convention, refraining from voting. Congress named the first Wednesday of January 1789 as the day for the choice of elec tors, the first Wednesday in February for the choice of Presi dent and vice president, and the first Wednesday in March for the inauguration of the new Government, at New York city. The last date fell on March 4, which continued the limit of each Presi dent's term for a century and a half.

When the votes of the electors were counted before Congress, it was found that Washington had been unanimously elected President, and that John Adams, standing next on the list, was vice president. Long before the inauguration the Congress of the Confederation had expired of mere inanition; its attendance simply ran down until (Oct. 21, 1788) its record ceased, and the United States got on without any national government for nearly six months. The struggle for nationality had been suc

cessful, and the old order faded out of existence.

Slavery.

The first census (1790) followed so closely upon the inauguration of the Constitution that the country may fairly be said to have had a population of near four millions in 1789. Something over half a million of these were slaves, of African birth or blood. Slavery of this sort had taken root in almost all the Colonies its original establishment being everywhere by custom. When the custom had been sufficiently established statutes came in to regulate a relation already existing. But it is not true, as the Dred Scott decision held long afterwards, that the belief that slaves were chattels simply, things, not persons, held good at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Times had changed somewhat. The peculiar language of the Constitu tion itself, describing a slave as a "person held to service or la bour," under the laws of any State, puts the general feeling exactly: slaves were persons from whom the laws of some of the States withheld personal rights for the time. In accordance with this feeling most of the Northern States were on the high road towards abolition of slavery. Vermont had never allowed it. In Massachusetts it was swept out by a summary court decision that it was irreconcilable with the new State Constitution. Other States soon began systems of gradual abolition, which finally extinguished slavery north of Maryland, but so gradually that there were still 18 apprentices for life in New Jersey in 186o, the last remnants of the former slave system. In the new States north of the Ohio slavery was prohibited by the ordinance of 1787 and the prohibition was maintained in spite of many at tempts to get rid of it and introduce slavery.

The sentiment of thinking men in the south was exactly the same, or in some cases more bitter from their personal entangle ment with the system. Jefferson's language as to slavery is irreconcilable with the chattel notion; no abolitionist agitator ever used warmer language than he. Washington, George Mason and other southern men were almost as warm against slavery as Jefferson, and there were societies for the abolition of slavery in the south. In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the strongest opposition to an extension of the period of non-inter ference with the slave trade from i800 to 1808 came from Virginia, whereas every one of the New England States voted for this extension. Like most slave laws, the laws of the south ern states were harsh : rights were almost absolutely withheld from the slave, and punishments of the severest kind were legal; but the execution of the system was milder than its legal possi bilities might lead one to imagine. The country was as yet so completely agricultural that southern slavery kept all the patri archal features possible to such a system.